I recently wrote a review of Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Pharma, for the European Medical Writers Association‘s journal. For the benefit of anyone who isn’t an EMWA member and doesn’t have access to the journal, here is my Bad Pharma review. You may also be interested in some previous posts I’ve written about the book: a general introduction, a detailed look at chapter 1, and an aside on the Tamiflu story described in chapter 1. I plan to write some … Continue reading
Vaccination is much in the news at the moment, given that low vaccination rates a few years ago have now led to a serious measles outbreak in south Wales. This is serious. About 60 children have so far been hospitalised, and if the outbreak continues, then it is quite possible that someone will die. It would therefore be particularly evil if, in the current context, alternative medicine practitioners were advising people not to be vaccinated. A recent story in the Guardian quotes the main … Continue reading
There’s an alternative health magazine here in the UK called “What Doctors Don’t Tell You” (actually, I think “alternative to health” might be a better description). It peddles all sorts of pseudoscientific nonsense, such as antivaccinationism and similar. When people are selling pseudoscientific nonsense, I think it’s always interesting to wonder whether they genuinely believe the stuff they’re selling, or whether they know that it’s nonsense and are cynically seeing an opportunity to make money. So I thought I’d do … Continue reading
Ghostwriting in the medical literature is something of a favourite topic of mine. There are many articles discussing the problem of ghostwriting, but more often based on opinion and prejudice than on facts and evidence. A great many myths about ghostwriting are endlessly rehearsed in medical journals, and those myths formed the subject of a guest blog post I wrote for PharmaPhorum a few months back. Those myths show no sign of going away, so I thought it might be … Continue reading
Followers of the Burzynski saga will be aware that the release of the latest Burzynski movie has been delayed. Apparently this movie has an associated Q&A, but for some reason the maker of this movie does not want anyone to see what’s in the Q&A until the movie is officially released. This made me think that a Q&A about Burzynski would be a useful resource, so I’ve written my own (with a little gratefully recieved help in researching links from … Continue reading
Opposition to vaccines is nothing new. In fact, it’s as old as vaccination itself. I have always found it puzzling how anyone could oppose vaccines, given that they have made a truly miraculous contribution to public health. The eradication of the killer disease smallpox by vaccination is, in my humble opinion, a serious contender for the greatest ever achievement of medical science. And, of course, many other previously common killer diseases are now extremely rare, thanks to vaccines, as this … Continue reading
We are pleased to announce the next date for our popular “introduction to medical writing” course, which will be held on 21 June in London. Book early to avoid disappointment, and to take advantage of the generous “early bird” discount. More details here.
I’ve been thinking about how clinical trials have certain things in common with supermarket beef lasagne. No, don’t worry, we don’t usually find horses hiding in inappropriate places in clinical trials. But in both cases, the key to having confidence in the product is traceability. There is a long chain of things that happen between where you start and where you end up, and knowing what happens at each stage of the process is key to verifying the authenticity of … Continue reading
Yesterday I made a brief appearance on the Canadian TV channel BNN, in which I provided a counterpoint to an interview with Ben Goldacre, who was talking about his book Bad Pharma. As regular readers of this blog will know, this is a subject I have written about more than once before, and will no doubt do so again. You can watch the video clip of my appearance here, and if you want to see what Ben said first, you … Continue reading
This is going to be a very brief post, because this story has been told in full elsewhere. But it’s an important story, and I wanted to draw your attention to it. The NHS Choices website is supposed to give impartial information on health that consumers can trust. There is a real need for such a site: the internet is littered with downright dangerous health information from people pushing various quack remedies. Where is the average person supposed to go … Continue reading